Bruno a victim of his chosen calling

Thumbs up: Frank Bruno on his release from hospital

By Jim White

12:01AM BST 20 Oct 2005

The day after Frank Bruno was sectioned under the Mental Health Act, The Sun's front page read: "Bonkers Bruno Locked Up." If you needed reminding how cruel a headline that was, then the evidence was all there in the film portrait, Frank Bruno: Gloves Off (ITV, Tuesday).

Bruno was in a desperate place that day in June 2003. He had descended into a pit of despair, depressed, lonely, self-loathing; he was hardly sleeping, and when he did it was in the ring he kept in the garden of his Essex home. Here's how detached from reality he had become.

In his last recorded interview before he was sectioned, he talked of a planned comeback against Lennox Lewis. He had everything arranged, he told the camera, including the identity of the referee. It was, he said, to be Michael Barrymore.

"I weren't doing anything crazy, you know," the man himself recalled two years on. "My brain just gave out." Why that happened, however, no-one on the programme could agree. His mum thought it was down to a vicious divorce (his ex-wife did not participate in the programme, so we never found out her view). Bruno himself reckoned reckless use of drugs had sent him "doolally". There was talk of falling in with a bad crowd, described by one friend as "well-wishers" by another, more ominously, as "Liverpudlians." No-one, though, wanted to blame boxing. As the voice-over told us, there is no known connection between the sport and the bipolar disorder with which Bruno was diagnosed.

Maybe not. But in a sense, boxing was responsible. It was clear from the trawl through his career that made up the first part of the documentary that the sport was everything to him. According to his mum, when he was a kid, she got calls every single day from the school to say her Franklyn was in trouble again. It wasn't until he discovered pugilism that he gained direction. In boxing he found wealth, status, purpose. And when he retired at 34, there was nothing left in his life.

Of course, most boxers manage to retire without being sectioned. Barry McGuigan, for instance, was, as always, lucid, thoughtful and perceptive on the programme. But Bruno found the early death of retirement impossible. The good news is he is feeling better now, more able to face life devoid of combat. His, though, is a compromised health; he may no longer box, but he needs to train as if tomorrow he will once more step into the ring.

"He is a prisoner of the gym," his biographer Kevin Mitchell said over shots of Bruno punishing that astonishing physique. "He has to do it to ward off illness." And once he thought facing Mike Tyson was the hardest thing he would have to do.

Those behind television sitcoms always bemoan the fact that reviewers have a go at their shows after the transmission of the first episode: give them time to bed down, they plead, give them the chance for their characters to grow. And to be fair, those critics who, after its first airing, wrote off Mike Bassett: Manager (ITV, Thursday) as a comedy with about as much punch as some of Bruno's early opponents were somewhat off-beam in their attack: three weeks into its run and it is clearly much more feeble than that. As Bruno was once dismissed as a horizontal heavyweight, this is a supine sitcom.

The premise is that Mike Bassett, formerly a less-than-triumphant England manager, is now on his uppers, the sinking manager of a sinking club, Wirral Town. The only thing worse than his players is his assistant, while his chairman is in a coma and the board have just sold the ground to make way for a furniture superstore.

The trouble is the only thing the scriptwriters have managed to extract from a subject ripe for satire is a centre-forward who, under hypnosis, scores a hat-trick of own goals and a rabbit of an opposition club mascot which our hero tells to "hop off." Which is about as funny as the average Bruno panto script. This is a work so enfeebled, so lacking in comedy confidence, you can only assume it was conceived by the football authorities to make the audience switch off their televisions and go seek entertainment down at their local football club.

Mind you, if we did that, we would miss out on the finest comedy performance on television: Phil Tufnell, attempting to look sincere in the commercials for an operation called Loans.co.uk. As he ingratiates for the camera, Tuffers gives new meaning to the old adage about never lending money to a man who looks untrustworthy; so slippery does he appear, this is a man from whom you would think twice about borrowing any.